From Webster To Seau and the Impact of More Medical Research on Repetitive Head Trauma in Football

I spent some time thinking about whether to even post on this subject today, not wanting to feel on any level that I might be either rushing to judgment too quickly, or even worse, exploiting a tragedy in any way to make a point. But the suicide of retired football star Junior Seau perfectly captures a point that I have been thinking through for years, as the concussion/head trauma issues have played themselves out in the NFL and the media. Way back in 2006, I wrote about the ERISA case brought by former Pittsburgh Steeler great Mike Webster, and the Fourth Circuit’s decision to overturn, as arbitrary and capricious, the decision of the plan administrator for the NFL’s retirement plan to award Webster “the lesser of two possible disability benefit awards available under the league’s retirement plan,” due to brain damage he apparently suffered as a player. At the time, the Fourth Circuit reviewed extensive evidence in the administrative record that soundly refuted the administrator’s determination, and concluded that the administrator’s determination was not supported by substantial evidence.

I have often thought about the Webster case and that blog post in the interim, because in many ways the actions of the administrator, at least in the snapshot provided by the Court, seem so questionable that it makes one wonder how the administrator could have reached the conclusion that it did. The evidence from the administrative record, although debatable in terms of how to interpret it, focused on by the Court ran strongly towards attributing the player’s mental incapacity to head injuries from playing and to have begun close to, if not during, his playing days, thus qualifying him for the benefits he sought. Yet, even under those circumstances, the plan administrator ruled against him.

Among the possible explanations for how this came to pass is one – incompetence by the plan administrator – that I have always ruled out. The second is a corporate decision by the plan and its administrator to hold the line against brain damage type claims, which is at least certainly possible, even if doing so on a broad level instead of simply testing the facts of each particular claim against the plan terms would be a clear cut violation of fiduciary obligations.

The third possible explanation that has rattled around in my head for the last few years, as more and more research has been done linking diminished mental capacity to the repetitive head trauma suffered by football players, has come to me to seem the most likely explanation. This is the idea that a decade and more ago, when the events at issue in the Webster case occurred, there was scant, if any, medical literature soundly tying post-playing mental impairment to playing-derived head trauma. That is not the case anymore, as Andy Staple’s piece here on Junior Seau’s suicide discusses, but it was then. Plan administrators are often faced, in many contexts, with disability claims in which there is little if any significant medical research that would allow a firm conclusion on causation with regard to the disability at issue. In those instances, it can be very difficult for a plan administrator to make a call on whether or not the plan terms governing disability benefits are satisfied. When one compares what we know now about the effect of repetitive head trauma in football – a knowledge level that is still limited – with the state of the research a decade and more ago, you can easily imagine the NFL plan’s administrator being trapped by the conundrum, and being unwilling to credit the evidence of impairment submitted by Webster because the medical literature lacked support for linking it to his playing days in the manner needed to award him the benefits sought by him. This, to me, is both the most benign and the most likely explanation for the long ago ruling against Webster, which it took an appeal all the way to the Fourth Circuit to set right. The state of medical knowledge though, as Staple’s current piece and many others in the past few years have made clear, no longer allows for that same possible mistake by a plan administrator.